A typical mobile communication network comprises one or more base stations and one or more user equipments. In particular, such a mobile communication network may be a UMTS, a 3GPP Long-Term-Evoultion (LTE) or 3GPP Long-Term-Evolution-Advanced network (LTE-A). Especially in RANs (radio access networks), the user equipments are connected to a base station directly or via a relay node. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical deployment scenario of LTE radio access network (RAN) with possible radio relayed extensions.
As specified in 3GPP TR 36.814 [3], for inband relaying, the eNB(eNodeB or base station)-to-relay node link operates in the same frequency spectrum as the relay node-to-user equipment (UE) link. Due to the relay transmitter causing interference to its own receiver, simultaneous eNB-to-relay node and relay node-to-UE transmissions on the same frequency resource may not be feasible usually. Similarly, at the relay node it may not be possible to receive eNB transmissions simultaneously with the relay node transmitting to the UE.
One possibility to handle the interference problem is to operate the relay such that the relay is not transmitting to terminals when it is supposed to receive data from the eNB, that means to create “gaps” in the relay-to-UE transmission. These “gaps” during which terminals are not supposed to expect any relay transmission can be created by configuring MBSFN subframes. eNB-to-Relay transmissions can be facilitated by not allowing any relay-to-terminal transmissions in some subframes. The allocation of the subframes to one kind of transmission is fixed. However when the traffic volume of the eNB-to-relay transmission (backhaul link) decreases in a short term, the pre-configured MBSFN subframe resource would be redundant. If these redundant MBSFN subframes can be managed to be used as subframes for the relay-to-terminal transmission (so called downlink access subframes), on the one hand, eNB can serve its associated UEs with more access resource, and on the other hand, RN can change the occasions of backhaul link to access link so as to provide more access resource and support larger access throughput.
There may be a need for providing a reliable and flexible method of changing a timeslot type or subframe type according to a received information within a mobile network.